In December 2011, hackers broke into the official website of India's ruling Congress Party and defaced the profile page of party president Sonia Gandhi with a pornographic message.

Though India has laws aimed at tackling cybercrime, many internet users feel it is not used effectively.

Even when arrests are made, very few people actually get convicted.

The police have recorded a little over 3,000 cases of cyber crime between 2007 and 2010, under various sections of the Information Technology (IT) Act.

"If I'm a spammer, I would rather spam from India to India and the rest of world because nothing will happen to me."

Free rein

In its report, Kaspersky said 14.8% of all spam email sent in the three months prior to the end of September had originated in India.

Darya Gudhova, Kaspersky's spam analyst, said a lack of security awareness had given spammers free rein.

She added that there was a growing level of cybercrime activity in developing regions such as Asia and Latin America.

The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI) estimates that the country has more than 112 million internet users, the third largest in the world after the US and China.

About seven million new users are being added every month, the IMAI said.

David Emm, a security researcher from Kaspersky Labs, said this growth was making life difficult for the authorities - but believed the arrests signalled a strong sign of intent from the Indian government to get a grip on scammers.

"One of the good things is that they are taking it as a serious issue," he told the BBC.

"Cybercrime activity is breaking out of the western European theatre and starting to affect other parts of the globe because of the massive growth in IT.

"[In Europe] we've had cybercrime legislation for a long time with lots of expertise and history of dealing with it - but if you go to other areas like Brazil or India, you find they don't necessarily have specific cybercrime legislation."